Ablaze

by Read, Piers Paul;

  Vladimir Lukin, one of Antoshkin’s helicopter pilots, who had flown in from Torzhok, received an official dose of eighteen rems before leaving the zone. Upon his return, he suffered from repeated headaches and became so easily tired that he was obliged to retire from the air force. Other pilots, veterans of Afghanistan, suffered in a similar way but concealed their symptoms to keep on flying and qualify for a full pension.

  Among the six hundred metro construction workers, forty became invalids within five years, suffering ailments as different as kidney failure and heart disease, which they ascribed to radiation. Four died, including the metro construction workers’ chief engineer at the time of Chernobyl, Victor Koreshkov. Ylena Holod, a physician treating the liquidators still working in the zone in the clinic at Chernobyl, thought she noticed a marked increase in stomach disease, cardiovascular disorders, arteriosclerosis and premature ageing. Unnatural lethargy and sweaty palms were clear signs to her of a decline in the number of lymphocytes in the blood.

  This diagnosis made by the doctors in the field was dismissed by the specialists in Moscow and Kiev. The twenty-five rems that had been received by the liquidators could not conceivably lead to any form of radiation disease. What people suffered from, said Academician Ilyn, was ‘radiophobia’, a psychological condition whereby every illness, from eczema to the common cold, was ascribed to radiation. If there was a deterioration in people’s health in the contaminated zones, it was possibly because people were afraid to drink the milk or eat the vegetables that had been imported by the authorities, and had thereby deprived their bodies of essential nutrients.

  Even as Ilyn reassured the populace, his scientists studied samples of blood for deviations from the norm, for though the liquidators had been limited to a dose of twenty-five rems, dosimetric controls were often inadequate and sometimes inexact. It was easy enough to measure background radiation, but there were many variables – small ‘hot spots’, for example, of much higher levels of radiation, or gusts of wind that could blow radioactive dust that entered the lungs of the workers. They did not find any evidence of damage to the immune system, but they did discover that radiation appeared to have affected the reproductive organs of some of the young soldiers, leading to ‘lazy’ sperm. It was this that led to the decision to replace the young conscripts with the older ‘partisans’.

  The research of Ilyn’s scientists remained classified: there was no opportunity for the physicians working for the republican governments to verify the findings of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow, or even the new All-Union Scientific Centre of Radiation Medicine, which had been set up in Kiev. All the medical records of the liquidators were kept by the Third Division of the Ministry of Health in the closed city of Obninsk. Lubov Kovalevskaya, working as a journalist in the zone, tried to establish a register of her own but discovered that orders had been given that service in the zone was not to be entered in a soldier’s record.

  It was the same for those who still lived in contaminated territory. Based on the data supplied by Israel’s hydrometeorology committee and Knijnikov’s laboratory at the Institute of Biophysics, the government commission had divided the contaminated areas into four zones:

  1.a zone of ‘alienation’, from which the entire population had been evacuated;

  2.a zone of temporary evacuation, in which, against official advice, one thousand people had returned to live and refused to move;

  3.a zone of constant control;

  4.a zone of periodic control, in which eighty-four thousand people lived in 176 villages. Of these, forty-seven thousand lived in areas where contamination of the soil by caesium 137 was over fifteen curies per square kilometre, which meant that food had to be brought in from outside.

  This strategy was not made public until 1989. In the style of Russian governments established well before the Revolution of 1917, orders issued from Moscow were expected to be obeyed without question or complaint. But this did not prevent the doctors who worked in the controlled zones from reporting an unusual amount of ill health. There were not only cases of thyroid dysfunction among the children – this had been expected – but also reports of cataracts, an unusual increase in bronchial and gastric infections and vague symptoms such as lassitude, headaches and depression.

  Again the government ascribed these to ‘radiophobia’, not merely a fear of radiation but also a misunderstanding of what precautions should be taken in the contaminated zones. The father of a child with rickets told Professor Knijnikov that he had made sure that his son had drunk no milk for the past three years. Moreover, the very thoroughness of the medical checkups in the contaminated areas uncovered a high level of endemic ill health. It was difficult to make comparisons with people’s conditions before the accident because no satisfactory statistics existed as a base against which to measure the new figures. Those that did exist were often false; epidemics of influenza, for example, had been concealed by ascribing the symptoms to a variety of different diseases.

  There were other factors. Because younger couples with children had left the area, the average age of the population had increased, with a consequent decrease in the ratio of healthy to unhealthy people. Where children remained, the danger of walking in the contaminated forests and the caution advised against eating mushrooms and berries had often resulted in parents keeping their children indoors, thereby depriving them of fresh air and their traditional sources of vitamins. Where they had been resettled, the difficulties they faced as evacuees, with no homes and no jobs, often billeted in frightened and unsympathetic communities, caused acute stress. The inhabitants of Pripyat, where life had been so agreeable and easy, suffered particularly from being so abruptly and brutally ejected from their homes. All this was undoubtedly a source of suffering, but could not be ascribed to the biological effects of radiation.

  2

  In August 1987, three months after the conference at Kiev at which the Soviet medical authorities had apparently come clean about the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, the reassuring scientific consensus was destroyed by an interview published in Soviet Nature magazine with the distinguished Ukrainian botanist Professor Dmitri Grodzinski.

  A biophysicist, radiobiologist and member of the Botanical Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Grodzinski had been ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture immediately after the accident to form a team to study the effects of large doses of radiation on the resistance of plants to disease. There was a fear that if this resistance decreased, it might lead to a widespread crop failure like the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine. The team began experiments with wheat and other plants within both the ten- and the thirty-kilometre zones, and in a greenhouse in the abandoned town of Pripyat, which produced some interesting results. It was found that while pine trees, like human beings, could be killed by a dose of six hundred rads, birch trees could withstand ten thousand rads and tomatoes thirty thousand. Indeed, some plants flourished after a dose of radiation; it had been one of Grodzinski’s outsized cucumbers that was offered to the public prosecutor, Yuri Shadrin, at Chernobyl.

  Despite the extension of his botanical research into the classified areas of radiobiology and biophysics, Grodzinski’s institute in Kiev was neither controlled nor funded by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. He had none of the instinctive military discipline of an Ilyn; preferring the novels of Walter Scott to the collected works of Marx and Lenin, he was in appearance and manner the classic absentminded professor, with rimless glasses and thick tufts of hair surrounding his bald dome. The blackboard on the wall of his office was covered with different formulas, graphs and theorems, and piles of unsorted papers lay on his desk.

  At the time of the accident at Chernobyl, Grodzinski’s laboratory in Kiev had registered a sharp increase in radioactivity. Instead of being authorized to warn the city’s people and suggest precautions, he had been told that his knowledge was classified, and his instruments had been impounded. In vain he had recommended iodine prophylaxis for
the populace. He was told that this would only lead to panic, even though fear was already leading people to drink iodine intended for disinfecting wounds. Later he had suggested adding calcium to bread to make up the deficiency for those in the controlled zones who were afraid to drink milk. This suggestion, too, was never adopted, nor were his anxieties made public. On the contrary, in an optimistic interview with TASS in June 1986, Grodzinski had described the different ways in which the soil around Chernobyl could be either purified or used to grow crops unaffected by radiation:

  Chernobyl soils are quite suitable for seeding perennial cereal grasses, such as English blue grass, orchard grass, and others. The fact is that radionuclides have virtually no effect on them. Following the chemical amelioration and a reliable consolidation of radionuclides deep into the ground, the land will return to normal, full-blooded life. Fields will no longer be quiet, and machines and people will appear again. Life will again settle in its habitual tracks. But it will be necessary to go to some trouble to restore this land to life.

  Two years later, in his article in Nature, Grodzinski changed his tune:

  It needs to be said openly that specialists today still know relatively little about radiation. That is why a large body of radiobiologists tend towards the view that even the smallest dose is harmful.… There is one important fact to grasp in connection with the collective dose of radiation. The collective dose is the sum total of the radiation of all the population. It is a delayed-action bomb. It seems to be the case that the large part of the injury done to the population is in the form of hidden recessive mutation. Mutational defects of this kind can pass into the homozygotic makeup, and hence manifest themselves as different genetic defects in the families of succeeding generations.

  The likelihood of these defects appearing was the so-called ‘coefficient of risk’, but because of the uniqueness of the Chernobyl disaster, any kind of accurate prediction as to its consequences was impossible:

  If we are talking about us getting used to it [the collective dose of radiation] in some way, then we are talking about a process which would take a very long time – the whole of an evolutionary period – and the end result of the radiation would still be the death of the population.

  The cause of this genocide, Grodzinski suggested, was not just the accident itself, but the failure of the authorities to warn the population about what had happened. Describing how his instruments had been impounded at the time, he blamed the officials ‘who were ignorant but had the power’:

  Secrecy and ecology do not mix. This secrecy springs from non-professionalism. When the accident happened, I met many of these so-called ‘professionals’ who were expounding verbiage about the accident and were giving recommendations, although they didn’t possess the slightest idea of the collective dose I have told you about or anything about the stochastic [probabilistic] effects of radiation.

  Grodzinski contrasted this silence with the action of the Finns, who only a few days after the accident ‘had already published … in black and white, how and what people could do within the polluted territory … where children can walk, how much and in which regions cattle should graze, what to eat, what to drink.’

  With no similar guidance in the Soviet Union, people had become afraid to drink milk, thereby depriving themselves of necessary calcium. As a result, two years later, ‘Kiev is gripped at the moment by an absurd speculation as to what was and what will be. It is gripped by fear. On television they are calling for society to remain calm. On these programmes, there is one leitmotiv: that there is nothing to be done to make the situation better; that the situation is getting better and will continue to improve all the time; and that the ecological consequences are zero or practically zero.’

  What was to be done? ‘First,’ suggested Grodzinski, ‘the population ought to be provided with individual dosimeters, like the Japanese who go to market armed with these devices so that they can check the radioactivity level of their cabbages and fish.’

  Further, people should also be advised on and provided with a vitamin-rich diet to bolster their immune systems. ‘People in general stopped eating vegetables because they were afraid of radiation. This is simply incorrect. In an organism deprived of vitamins, radiation acts all the more strongly.’

  Grodzinski did not recommend alcohol, which, though it increased resistance to radioactivity by a factor of 1.13, also destroyed the vitamin molecules that acted as ‘radioprotectors’.

  The most important lesson to be learned, however, was the need for glasnost. ‘Newer and newer problems keep revealing themselves all the time, problems which link up to such different fields of knowledge as psychology, medicine, radiology, mathematics, and construction. We shouldn’t expect that the number of these problems will suddenly and dramatically lessen. Quite the opposite: they will increase. I will underline this point once again; we must not, on any account, remain silent. We need glasnost. Each secret does more harm than good because it conceals the problem and prevents the academic community from arriving at a solution.’

  To illustrate the article, Grodzinski produced photographs of strange leaves and pine needles – instances of gigantism found within a few kilometres of the zone. In some cases the leaves of oak trees, normally twelve centimetres in length, had grown to seventy centimetres; and the leaves of lime trees to forty centimetres in diameter. In Grodzinski’s opinion, this was caused either by radiomorphosis or mutation; in subsequent generations of wheat grown in the ten-kilometre zone, interesting new species had been developed – one of the few gains from the accident at Chernobyl.

  The readers of Nature, however, reacted less calmly to what Grodzinski had revealed. The issue in which his article appeared quickly sold out, and copies started to change hands at fifteen times the published price. It was reprinted in other papers, and broadcast from Munich over the Voice of America. The photographs of freak leaves, taken with the view Grodzinski had expressed that even the smallest dose of radiation was harmful, and talk of the ‘death of the population’, caused widespread alarm. Thousands abandoned their homes and fled from the controlled zones without waiting for official sanction.

  Worse was to come. To the horror of the inhabitants, a sow in Narodici gave birth to a litter of piglets without eyes. News of this spread, and further freaks were discovered in the same region: a foal with eight legs, a chicken with a dragon’s head, a piglet with an eye half the size of its head, a calf with a lip like an elephant’s trunk, a goat with its hind legs three times longer than its front ones. Local veterinarians in Narodici reported that these genetic abnormalities had dramatically increased since the accident at Chernobyl. A small museum was founded with photographs of the freaks; which foreign newspapers were only too happy to copy. Vivid photographs of them appeared in newspapers and magazines abroad, and pictures of deformed children accompanied horrifying stories from the Ukraine. In London’s Sunday Times it was reported that ‘hospitals in the Ukraine, Belorussia and adjacent provinces of Great Russia are filled with victims. Whole wards are lined with gaunt, dying and deformed children.’

  In vain the Ministry of Health denied any increase in abnormal babies. Even Grodzinski was shocked when he saw what he took to be photographs of thalidomide-affected children portrayed in foreign magazines as the victims of Chernobyl, while Professor Vorobyov in Moscow denounced the stories as lies. However, Grodzinski was more ambivalent about the defects in animals. Although he had seen numerous mutations in plants within seven kilometres of the reactor, he thought it would be impossible to prove that the deformities in piglets were caused by radioactivity, but he did think it possible that if a pregnant sow lay on hot particles, they might penetrate the skin and be carried by the blood to the placenta. All the cells around the hot particle would die, and this would cause deformities. However, he was willing to admit that no one else supported his theory, and that in not doing so ‘they might be perfectly right’.

  Even mutations of this kind, however, were not to be confused
with genetic abnormalities. In Grodzinski’s opinion, a genetically malformed foetus would be recognized by the body and aborted. However, neither the reassurance of the specialists nor the insistence of experts from Agroprom that these animal deformities came from inbreeding or pesticides in the feed, and were also found in uncontaminated areas, calmed the inhabitants of the blighted areas. Many were convinced that the defects were caused by radiation, and there was a sudden spate of human abortions.

  Victor Knijnikov, Ilyn’s head of lab, who had studied the effects of radiation on the food chain for the past twenty-five years, was at first amused at a botanist’s excursion into his field, but when it became apparent that the man was being taken seriously, he became angry and tried to calm the fears that Grodzinski had aroused.

  However, Knijnikov was constrained by the cult of secrecy, which, despite glasnost, was still imposed upon those who worked under the aegis of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. His data was classified, and he had no wish to be arrested by the KGB or lose his job. Still, the fact that Grodzinski’s article had been published without dire consequences for the author or the editor of Nature suggested some political support for the position he had taken.